Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview

Computer and VideoGames has a nice interview with Star Wars: The Old Republic lead designer Daniel Erickson, who gives a lot of expansive, indepth answers. Worth a read.

With that in mind, do you think you’re going after MMO players or Bioware RPG fans?
Ideally, it’s both – and it’s sort of synergy of both. If you’re someone that loves everything an MMO brings to the table, loves the community aspect, loves being able to see other people and say: ‘I have better shoulder pads than you do,’ everything you loved about MMOs is there for you.

But if the idea of story and context really turns you off, if what you want is the just complete Disneyland experience, where you run on the rides and repeat the stuff, this probably isn’t your favourite MMO.

If you are a hardcore, traditional Bioware fan – a Mass Effect or especially Dragon Quest fan – this is the dream game. It is an RPG forever. It is an RPG that at the speed and pace that I play RPGs as a gamer, five ten hours a week, I could never finish this game.

One of the things people don’t ever get around is the class stories, which go through the whole game. They don’t stop.

There’s other content as well, which is more built towards multiplayer with your friends. But there is no crossover between the factions.

If you play as a Bounty Hunter from the first level to the last level, and then rolled up as a smuggler, you would not see one repeated piece of content. It would be an entirely new Bioware game from start to finish – that is multiple times bigger than a Mass Effect. This game is bigger than every Bioware game we’ve done put together. By a long shot.
(…)
PC gaming is often decreed as ‘in decline’. What’s your view?
It’s dead. Let’s be clear. It’s dead. Fantasy is also dead, RPGs are dead… Of course not. There’s a great, great piece that I think [Blizzard’s] Brian Bardo actually did as a speech. He was talking about the same stuff we heard when we were working on Dragon Age. They got told while working on World Of Warcraft that you couldn’t do another fantasy MMO because fantasy had been cannibalised by EverQuest.

All the people that were going to play a fantasy MMO were already playing one. There was [supposedly] no room to grow the market there.

Every two or three years we hear the announcement of fantasy being dead, PC gaming being dead and RPGs being dead. And yet, all of the biggest games that ever come out – that set the records – are nearly always PC games, and a lot of them are fantasy games.

The biggest game in the world is a fantasy, PC, RPG MMO. We all know the drawbacks of PC. We all scream at our boxes and try to make stuff work. But at the same time, the interface is made for games.

The mouse/keyboard interface allows so much less restriction [than console].
There was not a question when we started Old Republic – or any of our games, for that matter – [what the lead format would be]. There’s a reason the lead SKU for Dragon age was PC as well. When we’re developing an RPG, it’s a natural place to be.

Thanks VG247.